How to create a magnificent Metal Scrap Text Effect in Photoshop

In this tutorial, you will learn how to create a text effect that looks like text made from shiny and scraped metal in Photoshop using very simple and effective techniques. We will play with some layer styles and filters to create our text in a very quick time, the steps are much easier to follow, this tutorial requires no user expertise, even a first timer in Photoshop can create awesome text effects based on this.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to create a text effect that looks like text made from shiny and scraped metal in Photoshop using very simple and effective techniques. We will play with some layer styles and filters to create our text in a very quick time, the steps are much easier to follow, this tutorial requires no user expertise, even a first timer in Photoshop can create awesome text effects based on this.

Before going into the tutorial, let us see how the final image will look like.

Step 1:New Document

Create a new document of size 1280 by 1024 px with black as the background color.

Step 2: Add Text

Now add some text of any free style or handwritten style font, i am using the font Hand of Sean which can be downloaded from DaFont, about the size of 220px of color #f5b857. Position the text in the center of the document , aligning both the horizontal and vertical centers with respect to the background layer.

Step 3: Layer Styles for the text

Now add the following layer styles to the text layer.

Drop Shadow

Bevel and Emboss

This is the effect so far, after applying the above Layer styles…

Step 4: Duplicate and apply Ripple Distort Filter

Before applying the Ripple Distortion effect we are going to rasterize our text layer along with the layer effects, in order to do that, first duplicate our text layer and name it something like “ripple_effect”, create a new layer above the “ripple_effect” layer, select both the new layers and the duplicated text layer, merge them using Layers -> Merge Layers or simply press Ctrl + E (Cmd + E for Mac users). Don’t forget to rename the merged layer as the original “ripple_effect”. Now our text is ready to be distorted.

Step 6: Ocean Ripple Distortion Effect

Duplicate this layer one more time for a stronger effect since only one layer will somewhat have a mild appearance on the text.

Step 7: Gaussian Blur for shining metal effect

Duplicate the previous layer one more time and apply a Gaussian blur with Radius = 10

Now change the blending mode of this layer to Linear Dodge(Add)

This is how our final output will look like, please also take a look at how the layers are stacked against each other and arrange the same in the order given below for good looking final result.

Finally here is our final image with awesome looking scrap metal text effect. There are certain things i want to mention here, please be liberal with the use of layer styles, and also experiment with the settings while applying filters to get accurate and effective results.